Somebody Big Slept Here

By ROBERT STRAUSS

Published: March 28, 2004

PRINCETON—
ROBERT AND JILL CARR had been living in Princeton for nearly a dozen years last March when they noticed that a house on Library Place was for sale. It was a Tudor, built in 1896 but renovated and modernized several times over the years. It was set back from the somewhat busy street with lots of other beautiful houses surrounding it. It seemed like a place they'd like to move themselves and their three teenage children into.

Then they found out that it was originally owned by Woodrow Wilson, the only president of the United States elected from New Jersey. ''Well, yes, that made it all the more attractive,'' Mr. Carr said. The Carrs bought the house in 2003 and are now trying to restore the outside of the house to Wilson's original 1896 plans. ''Part of the time he was building the house, he was teaching at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, so he and his wife, Ellen, were corresponding about the intricacies of construction, so I think we'll come pretty close.''

New Jersey being the crossroads that it is, many famous people have lived here. George Washington slept in a lot of New Jersey houses that still stand, including Rockingham, in Kingston just outside Princeton, where he lived in 1783, and where he wrote his famous ''Farewell to the Troops.''

From 1940 to 1946, the nuclear physics pioneer Enrico Fermi (and winner of a Nobel Prize) lived at 382 Summit Avenue in Leonia. For the past 24 years, George and Jean Flynn, who both teach at Columbia University, as did Fermi, have lived in the house. Though they have lived there four times longer than the Fermis, they are still comfortable with it being called ''the Fermi House'' in the neighborhood.

''The story is that on Dec. 7, 1941, after the Pearl Harbor attack, the Fermis were deathly afraid of having to flee their home once again,'' said Dr. Flynn, a chemistry professor. ''They apparently put all their family treasures in a coal bin in the basement to hide them. Now if you go down there, you can see a filled-in cutout just near where the coal bin had been, so I believe that story.''

Some houses where New Jersey's famous lived have been restored and are visitor-ready. Others are still being used as residences, like the Carrs' and two other Wilson houses in Princeton. Others are gone. For instance, the birthplace of Bud Abbott, the tall half of the Abbott and Costello comedy team, was razed and is now a parking lot on Munroe Avenue in Asbury Park.

But the once-dilapidated home at 508 Fourth Avenue in Asbury Park where the writer Stephen Crane grew up has had a happier fate. In 1995, Tom and Regina Hayes saw that the house and a carriage house behind it were going to be demolished and they paid $7,500 to buy it and save it. Among the people who helped them restore it was Frank D'Alessandro, a retired Middletown High School math teacher who lived in Asbury Park. When the Hayeses decided to move out of town, Mr. D'Alessandro approached them to buy the Crane house.

''I couldn't offer them what other people might have, but they liked the idea that I was going to try to keep it a meeting place for Crane fans,'' he said. ''When I was in high school, we had to read 'The Open Boat,' one of the great stories in the English language, which Crane wrote. You would be generous to say I didn't appreciate it at the time. But now, because of the Hayeses and all, I've become quite fond of Crane.''

Crane came to Asbury Park with his mother and siblings in 1883, when he was 12. His father, a minister, had died while the family was living in Port Jervis, N.Y. His mother, who eventually led the local Women's Christian Temperance Union, then moved her nine living children to the 19-room house in Asbury Park, which was then a fairly religious Methodist town. Stephen learned to write as a young journalist for a news service his older brother ran, staying in the house until moving to New York's bohemian artist colony in the early 1890's.

Mr. D'Alessandro keeps a small museum and library of Crane memorabilia and books. ''I have more copies of 'The Red Badge of Courage' than I know what to do with,'' he said. Three years ago, Bruce Springsteen donated money for the upkeep of the house. Mr. D'Alessandro and other Crane lovers have regular programs at the house. Next month, he plans one about Mr. Crane's life in Asbury Park.

There is no evidence that Crane ever visited Walt Whitman, who spent the last years of his life in Camden. Whitman's six-room, wood-frame house is in the middle of a row of otherwise undistinguished homes near city hall. From the street in front of the house, a visitor can look up at city hall to see carved in the stone tower an excerpt from his ''Leaves of Grass,'': ''In a dream, I saw a city invincible.''

When Whitman moved there to be near his brother and mother in 1884, Camden was a whirring industrial city. Whitman reveled in watching the boats ply the nearby Delaware River and often held literary court at his house, receiving visitors like Oscar Wilde, who rushed to Camden to meet Whitman soon after arriving from England.

The Whitman house at 328 Mickle Boulevard has recently been restored to look the way it did soon before he died in 1892.

As Whitman received visitors in Camden, the only United States president born in New Jersey, Grover Cleveland, did the same at the White House. Cleveland's birthplace at 207 Bloomfield Avenue in Caldwell is open to visitors from Wednesday through Saturday. After his presidency ended in 1897, Cleveland moved to Princeton. he home, a massive yellow Georgian Revival house, is private and set far back from the street at 15 Hodge Road. Like the Wilson house that the Carrs are restoring, it looks much the same from the outside as when Mr. Cleveland lived there from 1897 until his death in 1908.

''We're going through like 17 layers of paint to find the dark green Wilson had the timbers painted,'' said Mr. Carr, an executive in the credit-card-processing business. ''We've become quite interested in his life. I've bought the 69-volume set of his writings. We have some photographs -- like one of him throwing out the first ball of the 1916 World Series. And friends find us stuff on eBay. It's a great place to live.''

The Living Dead

ROCKINGHAM STATE HISTORIC SITE -- Open Monday through Friday. Information: 609-683-7132 or www.rockingham.net.

STEPHEN CRANE HOUSE -- Open by appointment. Information: 732-775-5682.

WALT WHITMAN HOUSE -- Open Wednesday through Saturday. Information: 856-964-5383 or nj.gov/dep/parksandforests/historic/whitman/index.html

GROVER CLEVELAND HOUSE -- 973-226-0001 or gcmuseum@superlink.net

Photos: Oh, Al and Woody's places: In Princeton, Albert Einstein once lived at 112 Mercer Street, above, and Woodrow Wilson lived at 82 Library Place, right, which is being renovated by Robert and Jill Carr. (Photographs by Jill C. Becker for The New York Times)